open-ssl-performance-paper

Intel recently developed highly optimized implementations of cryptographic functions on Intel® architecture (IA). Intel worked with OpenSSL to integrate these implementations, starting with OpenSSL* 1.0.1.

We measured the performance gains of OpenSSL on a dual Intel® Xeon® Processor X5680 system, that is OpenSSL performance using the built-in speed test, as well as at the system-level running an Apache web server sending HTTP over SSL to clients on a network.

OverviewIntel recently developed highly optimized implementations of cryptographic functions on IA. Intel worked with OpenSSL to refine and integrate these implementations starting with OpenSSL 1.0.1, as well as in the libintel-accel plug-in engine for older OpenSSL versions.

The OpenSSL project provides an open source implementation of the SSL/TLS protocols, and is a commonly deployed library for SSL/TLS world-wide. The SSL/TLS protocols consist of two phases: an initial session-initiation/handshake phase, and a bulk data transfer phase.

Intel’s cryptographic optimizations speed up the handshake and the bulk data transfer phases of OpenSSL. This paper describes the functions developed in Intel’s cryptographic optimizations, and presents the performance gains measured on a dual Intel® Xeon® Processor X5680 system, which consists of two 6-core Intel® processors based on the 32-nm microarchitecture, supporting the Intel® AES New Instructions extension. We measured the performance gains for OpenSSL using the built-in speed test, as well as at the system-level running an Apache web server sending HTTP over SSL to clients on a network.